Exploring Complicity by Neu Michael;Dunford Robin;Afxentiou Afxentis;Neu Michael;

Author:Neu, Michael;Dunford, Robin;Afxentiou, Afxentis;Neu, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model

Chapter 8

Shades of White Complicity

The End Conscription Campaign and the Politics of White Liberal Ignorance in South Africa

Daniel Conway

It has become a standing joke that since democracy in South Africa one cannot find anyone who supported apartheid. Increasingly some white South Africans claim that they did not know what was happening during apartheid; that it was not their generation that was responsible for apartheid, but that of their parents; and even that it was not as bad for black people during apartheid as it is for white South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa.1

The public hearings and official reports of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) comprehensively documented how white South African complicity was essential to the political, economic and social operation of apartheid in all its multifaceted forms. In contemporary South Africa, white people deploy multiple discursive strategies to obscure or misrepresent their complicity in the apartheid past and to make claims about their entitlements in the new South Africa. Melissa Steyn identified one such strategy of white complicity in the quotation above. The TRC’s official report observed another when it concluded ‘the white community often seemed either indifferent or plainly hostile to the work of the Commission’2; many of whom dismissed the work of the TRC as that of the ‘crying and lying commission’.3 White conservatives were particularly sharp in their denunciation of, and disengagement from, the Commission: former president PW Botha refused to testify and his successor in office FW de Klerk withdrew from the process and used legal channels to successfully suppress the official conclusions of the TRC about his presidency.4 White liberals, those who were actively opposed to apartheid either via white anti-apartheid organizations such as the Black Sash5 or End Conscription Campaign (ECC)6, or who were part of the institutionalized opposition in white parliamentary politics, such as the Progressive Federal Party (PFP)7 embraced the TRC more fully and have been more vocal in apparently proclaiming the non-racial values of the new South Africa. There were also whites active in the African National Congress (ANC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF)8 who would most likely have been critical of what they perceived as the complicity of white liberals and the institutions of white liberalism with apartheid and thereby more radically leftist and non-complicit in their political motivations. It does not follow, however, that whites who were actively opposed to apartheid were entirely free from complicity, or that they have subsequently embraced the values and political imperatives of the new South Africa.

There are gradations and variations in levels of white complicity and these have varying social, political and economic consequences for South Africa. There is, of course, a difference between white conservative, white liberal and white radical responses to contemporary South Africa, as there were differences at the time when some whites openly opposed the principles and practices of apartheid while others actively supported and enforced them. As this chapter will argue, white liberals and white radicals were often complicit in white privilege during apartheid and faced difficult choices when choosing strategies of opposition to white minority rule.

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